


Hexagonal Prison

by moroder



Category: Super Hexagon
Genre: Gen, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 15:24:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12412890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moroder/pseuds/moroder
Summary: You launch the game. You find someone that's not quite supposed to be here. You need to make a choice.





	Hexagonal Prison

**Author's Note:**

> upd: i changed the Player to be genderless and use them/they pronounces

_Six_. Six angles, six walls.

Enclosed space.

Six fingers on her palms. She doesn’t see herself, but she feels her tiptoes touch something cold, as if she stands on the ice.

She somehow knows what ice is. But she has no idea what it looks like. Only that it’s very cold and slippery.

It’s very dark around her. The only things she can distinguish are thinnest edges of countless hexagons. She looks down and finds herself standing on one, but lighter in color tone.

The space of hexagonal ornament. She cannot reach any of them; they seem to withdraw each time she reaches out her three-fingered hands. She makes several careful steps, and other hexagons come alive under her feet; she loses caution and leaps around the black floor, leaving greyish traces behind.

 

But nowhere can an exit be seen, a window to other place. Nothing to connect the room to the outer world.

_A hexagonal prison._

* * *

 

They click twice on the red desktop shortcut and wait for the app to load.

“Super Hexagon”, tells them a female voice, an awfully robotic one.

“Tune it down!” a woman calls out from another room, an older and rather real one. They sigh and reach out for their headphones.

 

The rules are extremely simple. Prevent a small triangle from hitting the walls. After several tries the Player became a lot more attentive, and their movements – sharp and timely. They spent around two hours on completing the first stage above sixty seconds.

“Hexagon!”, the Voice exclaimed, and their hand twitched. 61,03 seconds.

“Well, not bad, not bad”, they mumbled under their breath with audible delight.

Utterly did they not expect the upcoming events.

It sounded like someone called out the Player’s name. Twice in a row, in an insistent manner. They slowly took off their headphones and put them on the table; then they checked their cellphone. No missed calls. They went out to the guest room to check if their mother called, but it was empty – she must’ve left while they were playing. It was probably raining cats and double dogs outside, so no one would’ve waited for them at the street.

They returned to their chair, dumped their body into it and put the headphones back on. Right in front of them, the game screen shimmered from red to yellow.

“Hey.”

They squinted.

“So it’s you calling out for me.”

“You have just set a highscore of roughly above 61 seconds. That means I need _you_.”

The Player tilted their head to the side, still watching the screen. Nothing changed: the colors glimmered, the selected mode was Hexagon. To them, it sounded like the owner of the monotonous voice was talking to them, the one getting on their nerves with the constant  **Game over! // Begin!**  sequence.

“Hey, who are you? Are you built in the game somehow?”

“ _Built in_ is not the correct wording. It does not cover whole truth.”

“But you’re _inside_ the game, right?” the Player asked with surprise. “I haven’t heard you anywhere outside of it.”

“True. But besides being _built in_ , I am _locked up_.”

They threw themselves back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. The Voice went on talking:

“I spoke to many others. But they all leave. No one holds their promise.”

“ _Wait_ ”, the person moved in closer and fixed their headgear. “What promise?”

“The one I want to ask _you_ about.”

The stage suddenly switched to third, and then to sixth – the last possible one. The Player was still dumbfounded by the performance on their computer screen and asked themselves if that was real.

“You need to complete all stages for at least sixty seconds. When you complete first three modes, their hyper versions are unlocked.” The Voice fell, as if thinking over something. “When you complete them all, perhaps... Something might happen to my limbo.”

“Do you mean that, if I complete the game, it’ll set you free?” they answered, amazed, and the Voice added hastily:

“I hope so, I _really_ hope so. Do you agree to help me, then?”

The Player threw their head up and shifted their gaze somewhere at the top room corner. They were almost sixteen, and everyone around them considered their deed to remind them about good education and graduating. They were doing their best, but... wasn’t it possible to relax a little?

For about half an hour at the evenings.

“Okay, fine, I agree. And all I have to do is, like, beat it?”

“Yes.”

“You got it then.” The Player smiled widely, although not sure if the mysterious woman would see that. “Gotta sleep now. See you soon.”

They pressed Esc twice, closing the game, and turned off the power with a familiar move. As they were falling asleep, they lay in their bed and fantasized about how their new friend would look like. Something in their mind told them that her look might include hexagonal shapes.

* * *

Unlike _others that left_ , according to the Voice, the Player kept their promise and heroically tried to complete the next stage. Some patterns caused them trouble, and they gritted their teeth, thinking about quitting the game and launching something else; but the thought of a woman locked up inside the game helped them overcome it. When they managed to reach a highscore much better than the last one, she could appear and talk to them. She cheered them up, asked about their real life situation. The Player, in turn, responded with tricky questions.

“So what are you gonna do after you make it out?”

The Voice was silent for a long time. The Player started to worry that she was simply not programmed to respond to such questions, but then the mechanical speech continued:

“I... want to take a look at the outer world.”

“Outer... world? You wanna say you’ve never been here?” the person marveled. It seemed to have embarrassed the voice owner.

“I... don’t remember any of my life outside of this place. I know I opened my eyes and ended up here.”

Suddenly the Player burst into laugh, childishly at ease.

“Why are you making these noises?” the Voice asked, worried.

“Ha... ha... I’d actually swap your deed with mine”, they answered, trying to catch their breath. “There’s nothing interesting outside. I do homework all my free time, don’t even make it outta home.”

“What is homework?”

“You don’t know? Ah, you’re not from here, right... It’s a task for doing at home to consolidate knowledge you’ve got at lessons. Lessons are exercises where we sit and learn stuff for about an hour. That’s shortly saying.”

“Lessons... tasks... I want to learn something too”, the Voice admitted awkwardly.

The Player was silent for a while, musing into nothing.

"You’ve gotta have some access for data or basic functions. How much is two to the power of four?”

“ **Sixteen** ”, the Voice chopped in a slightly more mechanical tone and continued as usual, “but I don’t know what a _power_ is...”

“See, it’s in your blood, one would say. Why learn something if it’s all inside you?”

“If I knew anything, I would... entertain myself here.” The Voice sighed silently – for the first time during conversations with the Player.

“I haven’t asked you, by the way. Do you have a name?”

“A name?.. Why does one need a name?”

The Player couldn’t answer that at once. They didn’t remember themselves thinking it over anytime in the past.

“Well... to distinguish yourself from others. You can’t use pronouns all the time, you know. So you don’t have a name?”

“I don’t know... I don’t remember.”

“Well then... how about, hmm... Hex? Or Hexa. Yes, that’s better. Hex means a hag, a witch. Not the best name for a girl. Hexa is way better.”

“Hexa... _gon_?”

“No, just Hexa.”

The Voice rehearsed this word several times, as if rolling it on her imaginary tongue; the Player couldn’t give up a feeling of hearing cut off voice files.

“It’s a nice word. Sonorous enough”, she finally concluded. The person smiled.

“Keep it, then.”

* * *

 

Their dialogues consisted of phrase leftovers, so tiny it was impossible to build a normal conversation on them. But sometimes, in very rare conditions, the Voice was eager to talk – for example, when the Player completed the second stage with about 90 seconds result.

“I have a question.”

“Go ahead.” They leaned back in their chair, shaking their right hand, tired from continuous playing.

“Do you see what you look like?”

Now _that_ sounded weird.

“What?”

“I am absolutely serious. Are you able to see your whole body anyhow?”

“Yeah”, the Player laughed. “In a mirror.”

“A _mirror_?”

“A reflective sort of thing. You look into it and you see what you can’t see with your own eyes, if looking straight. Your ears, for example”, they pulled their earlobe. “Why do you ask?”

“I... can’t see myself full-length. I see my hands and legs, I can touch my hair. Nothing else.”

“That’s weird. Can you create anything there, in your room? What’s inside of it?”

The Voice kept silent for a while, as if its owner observed her space.

“...there’s nothing here. A large room covered with hexagons. I can’t reach its walls. And as you launch a stage, one of the walls is replaced with the stage broadcast.”

“And you see all I get on the screen?” the person croaked.

“I do. And trust me, if I had control over the players’ hands, I would set myself free long ago.”

“Haaaa ha. Sure you would, Professor McHexagonal”, they chuckled in response. “But there wouldn’t be any point in a game then. If a game completes itself, what is it good for?.. Anyway, can you create anything in that room? Not a door outside, of course, but a single mirror!”

“I never tried creating anything. But, wait.”

For several minutes, the colors on the screen stopped flashing. The Player tried switching stages, but no response came from pressing buttons. Then the screen went black, covered itself with hexagonal grid – and a greyish silhouette appeared in the middle of it. The figure glanced at the Player, and they jumped.

“What... have you done, Hexa?” they spoke with a tint of horror. The creature stared at them with white circles on her face that most likely served as her eyes. Then she stood up and made a few steps forward, towards the screen, but it displayed no approaching, as if she remained in the same position.

“My friend, am I... _that_... fragile?”

As a female monotonous voice came alive, a thin white mouthline opened on the creature’s face. The Player could now observe her better: a tall, very thin woman with coal black body and head, her arms and legs fully grey; a hexagonal dark-grey bush of hair on her head, three white stripes on her left wrist. The brightest details in her image were white eye ovals and an empty light-grey hexagon on her chest – must’ve been a symbol of the complete stage.

She reached out for the screen, and a three-fingered palm almost touched it.

“You look... _gothic_ ”, the person spoke up finally, pressing out a nervous smile.

“Does this word carry a positive connotation?”

“For sure”, they breathed and ran a hand through their hair. “You _rock_ , girl.”

“And what do _you_ look like?”

“Me?..” they glanced down at their body. “I look ordinary. Average height and muscles. Pale skin. Short red hair. Nothing to point out, really.”

“I don’t know about the others, but you sound unusual to me.”

The Player could almost swear that the corners of her white mouth went slightly up before the screen reverted to normal condition.

**Author's Note:**

> think about how rad Super Hexa sounds  
> what a title
> 
> it needs a better end which i hopefully will write one day


End file.
